Valhalla (16 page)

“Jagger asleep?”

“Finally.”

“That his problem? He can’t sleep?”

“Who says he has a problem?”

“Eddie, for one.”

Eve made no response. She had sat down on the hearth, tucking her green velvet robe tightly around her legs and buttocks. Stone could see now that she was shivering.

“You want my blanket?” he asked.

“What would that leave you with?”

“Well, I’ve been in here, closer to the fire.”

“No thanks,” she said. “I’ll be all right.”

Stone had the feeling that hours passed then, though it was probably only a minute or so, during which she continued to sit there as close to the fire as she could safely get, her face aglow with it, her hair coruscating, a blaze in
itself. And she said nothing. She was alone, isolate, gone somewhere. Abruptly she came back.

“He can’t sleep because he’s afraid he’ll wake up blind. And when he’s awake he’s afraid he’ll bump his head and become blind again. And when he sleeps he dreams he’s blind and down in that hole where the blacks kept kicking him and tormenting him.”

“Can’t blame him for that, I guess,” Stone said.

“He’ll get over it.”

“And Dawson? Why was he so hostile tonight?”

Eve smiled wryly. “Jag didn’t know they were black. When he saw Mama for the first time last night he said something—I don’t remember what it was, I wasn’t listening. And then today he told Dawson that his sight was already coming back—he knew it before the service last night, but went through with it anyway—don’t ask me why. I guess Dawson figures he’s lying, that it’s just racism.”

“And what do you think?”

“I don’t think anymore. I try not to. I just want to be warm again.”

Stone suggested that she sit up on the end of his couch and share his blanket.

She gave him a despairing look. “Don’t you ever give up?”

“Couldn’t it be kindness?” he asked. “Couldn’t it be I just want you to be warm?”

She did not answer.

“Why not risk it?” he said. “I promise I won’t attack you.”

Shrugging, she got up and sat down at the end of the sofa, where his feet had been. Sitting up himself, he drew
the blanket over them. He put his arm behind her, on the back of the sofa.

“That feel better?” he asked.

“Not yet.”

Across the room, Eddie rolled onto his side, facing away from them. He sighed and made a faint whimpering sound, like a child dreaming.

“We had a little talk tonight, Eddie and I,” Stone said. “Some of it was about you.”

“And it makes you think I should be a pushover, right?”

“I already know you’re not that.”

“Good.”

“What bothers me is I feel we’re about to separate, and I won’t be able to—” Stone fumbled for the right words. “—to press my case.”

“You don’t have a case.”

“But I do. At least in the old-fashioned sense of the word. Like Billy’s got a case on Sally.”

She looked at him and shook her head wonderingly. “I can’t figure you. How can you be so fucking silly, so
romantic
—here, now, with the world gone to hell? The question for all of us is survival, not
romance.”
Her voice scorned the word.

Stone shrugged. “I don’t know. I just know I want you.”

“Want
me! Like what? Like you want a steak or a martini?”

“Not like that.”

“Why not Annabelle? She seems hot for you.”

Stone had no reasonable answer for her. Yet, out of a kind of perversity, he tried to give her one. He told her that it was a subject—sexual attraction, sexual choice—that he had given some thought to. And he had toyed with
the theory that it all came down to utility, that the beautiful were essentially the healthiest and strongest as well, the most likely to bear children easily and to be of help on the hunt and in the field. But nature masked its purposes and made one think he was choosing a woman for the romantic reasons of beauty and sexual attraction when in fact he was unconsciously selecting her on the same utilitarian bases his forebears had used.

“Beauty as utility,” Eve said. “That’s a new one.”

“It’s just a theory. Gave it up a long time ago.”

“And you have a new one now?”

“About us?”

“Us?
I didn’t know there was an us.”

“Of course there is. But I’m not sure I have a theory. Maybe egotism. Maybe I feel I’d value myself more if I were—” He wanted to say
loved
—“If I were esteemed by someone like you.”

At that, she turned and looked at him, and he saw the old hardness, the carapace of ice, forming again. “Is this a line you’ve used before?” she asked.

“Why? Is it effective?”

“It might have been,” she said, almost sweetly, disarming him so she might thrust all the more deeply. “Yes, it might have been—if I didn’t know how calmly you watched me being raped.”

Stone was grateful for the dimness and the firelight, because he could feel his face flushing. For long moments he sat there meeting her implacable gaze, feeling the poisons of rage spreading in him. Finally he pulled the blanket off them and dropped it onto the floor. He seized the lapels of her robe and brutally whipped her across his body flat onto the couch, so that she was lying where he had lain earlier. Then he pinned her free arm, he split her legs with his
own, he took her face in his hand as she opened her mouth to scream.

“Don’t bother,” he said. “I’d be afraid it’d freeze off. All I want is a taste, one last suck on an ice cube.”

With that, he kissed her on the mouth, deeply, fiercely, holding her there until she began to weaken, to give in. Then he got up and pulled her with him. He shoved her away, toward the hallway.

“Don’t come back,” he said.

Stone was able to sleep only a few more hours before he was awakened again, this time by the gorilla-sized hand of Awesome Dawson shaking him.

“Wanna go fishing?” the big man asked, grinning in the firelight.

“Sure. I guess so.” Stone did not know what he was saying.

“Let’s get started, then. The early bird gets the worm.”

Stone stumbled through his bathroom duties and somehow made it out to the lake, where Dawson was loading rods and other equipment, including a rifle, into one of the aluminum rowboats next to the dock. The black man then settled onto the rower’s seat as Stone undid the plastic tether and pushed them off. The oars dipped into the water and the skiff surged ahead, out into the lake.

“Hey, this is the life, huh?” Dawson said. “Makes you almost feel like the good old days.”

Stone smiled, suddenly feeling not so bad himself about being up and around instead of sleeping. Though the sun had not risen yet, the sky was slowly brightening, turning
opalescent as a few cirrus clouds caught sunlight high above them. The lake, warmer than the air, steamed as if it were some infernal lagoon. And across the cove Valhalla rose out of the mist like a frigate in a Turner seascape. There was sound too: the cry of a loon lost somewhere in the fog and a bobwhite on shore and one of Smiley’s roosters crowing arrogantly. Each seemed to think the world was the same as ever, altering not by a single note or decibel the comforting monotony of its call. So Stone decided to go along with the birds: for the next few hours he too would pretend. He was a free man living in a land of peace and plenty. And luckier than most, he was out fishing on a beautiful lake in the Ozarks. The sun would soon be up and he would be warm, and when he returned he would be carrying a stringer of bright bass.

“Did you hear about the bodies the O’Briens found yesterday?” Dawson asked.

Stone felt as if he had been hit by an oar. He shook his head. “No. What bodies?”

“Smiley and I told the O’Briens not to talk about it—no sense scaring the ladies. But they were out hunting yesterday afternoon about three miles north of here, and they came on this small farm that had been burned out. It was still smoldering. They found the bodies in the barn, a man and two boys, hanging from the rafters. They’d been shot.”

“Jesus Christ.” Stone looked back across the water at the Point, the picture postcard cabins looking so secure and peaceful amid the trees, with plumes of wood smoke rising from their chimneys. “Just three miles?” he said.

Dawson nodded. “That’s what Harlan told us. It’s an area they’d hunted before and they never saw any sign of trouble. They’d bagged a couple of rabbits and were cutting
across a field when they saw the smoke. They checked it out, found the bodies, and then split for home.”

“But they didn’t see the gang itself, huh? No campsites or—?”

“We don’t even know it was a gang,” Dawson cut in. “It could’ve been a family member, or neighbors, or just some strangers passing through.”

“You said they were shot. And hanged.”

Dawson gave him an odd, knowing look, as if he had just remembered who Stone was. “And that means some gang of black kids, right?”

Stone said nothing for a few moments, because that was precisely what he had been thinking. Finally he nodded. “It could be, yeah. The element of overkill. In St. Louis we saw a lot of it anyway. People call them Mau Mau, after the gang in New York.”

“Yeah, I know all about
them,”
Dawson said. “Even us niggers hear the news now and then.”

Stone tried to sound matter-of-fact, even indifferent. “Well, that was the gang’s initiation rite, wasn’t it? Not just killing a white, but mutilating him too.”

Dawson looked at him. “And you believed it, didn’t you? Tell me, did you believe they ate the stuff too, like the originals, the Mau Mau in Kenya?”

“I heard the rumor, that’s all.”

Dawson was stroking powerfully, taking his anger out on the water. “Down south,” he said, “—in fact in this very country right here, the white man used to get his kicks castrating blacks—before hanging them or burning them.”

“You’re talking about the past. I’m talking about now.”

“So am I.”

But Stone found he could not back down. “You blacks
still want a double standard,” he said. “Our malefactors should be punished. Yours should be understood.”

Dawson broke the powerful rhythm of his stroking and for a tense few moments sat there staring bleakly at Stone. Then suddenly he grinned.

“You know, you got a point,” he said.

Stone did not respond and Dawson wagged his head ruefully. “Being black can sure be a drag,” he went on. “You get so damn paranoid. Day in and day out you run into so many racists, both conscious and otherwise, that finally it just takes you over. You become a sort of racism monitor, with your guard always up. And first thing you know, everything else goes by the boards. You ain’t living—you’re
monitoring.”
He laughed richly at the idea.

Stone smiled and said something inane about whites probably never being able to understand what blacks endured, living in a white society. He had picked up one of the rods and Dawson told him to go ahead and troll with it while he rowed.

“That spinner will ride deep if you don’t reel in too fast,” he said. “And you gotta stay deep for bass this time of year. When we get to the good spot, past Valhalla there, we’ll try some of Smiley’s nightcrawlers.”

Stone expressed surprise that they had worms this late in the year, and Dawson explained that they came from Baggs’ “worm farm” in the basement of the lodge. Turning sideways on the stern seat, Stone drew back the rod and cast with it, dropping the lure into the water about a hundred feet behind the boat. Then he slowly drew the spinner in, not surprised at finding nothing snagged on its gleaming hooks. As he repeated the process, Dawson went on about his racial problems.

“I guess it’s Jagger that got me all uptight these last
couple days. He’s a perfect example that I mean. I figured a world-class athlete like that, playing tennis all over the world—well, you just don’t figure that kind of guy for a bigot. So you let your guard down. You break your butt being nice to him, trying to make him feel at home. And I even talk Mama into trying her powers on him, which she don’t really like to do—it takes so much out of her, and when she fails she thinks it’s because the Lord is disappointed in her.”

Stone was listening carefully as he continued to cast and troll.

“Anyway,” Dawson said, “I talked her and Jagger into the thing. You were there. You saw what it was like—him sitting there blind and scared. And a couple hours later the veil is lifted and he can see again. So what happens? Does he cry and shout and praise the Lord? Does he get down on his knees and kiss Mama’s hand, the hand that cured him? No way. Instead, he just looks at her and says
You’re black
. Says it the same way he might say ‘You’re diseased’ or ‘You’re a leper.’ It wouldn’t have sounded any different. Just
You’re black.”

Rowing fiercely again, the big Negro gave a dry laugh, a bark of contempt. “Can you beat that, huh? Mama didn’t even tell me about it until the next day. And then Jagger had the gall to come to me and volunteer—
volunteer
, mind you—that he only went through with the ceremony because he already knew his sight was coming back. He could feel it coming back, he said. I asked him why he was bothering to tell me this and he said he just didn’t want me getting any wrong ideas—he didn’t believe in voodoo, he said.
Voodoo
. How about that, huh?”

“Strange,” Stone said. “Passing strange.”

Dawson did not agree. “No, not strange at all. Not from where I sit anyway. Plain, simple, old star-spangled racism, that’s what it was. And that’s what I call it.”

Stone had stopped reeling in the spinner and now was just letting it drift along the bottom, in the hope that it might interest something down there. For some reason, Dawson’s tale of woe had not reached him, possibly because he seriously doubted that racism had been behind Jagger’s behavior. From what he knew of the man, it was self-interest that moved him, not matters of race or politics. And he said so now.

“You know, it could be true what Jagger said about his sight. The day we arrived here he was shielding his eyes more than he had before—as if he could sense more light.”

“He didn’t say nothing to me about it.”

“And as for what he said to your mother—that could have been simple shock. You’ll admit she looks different than she sounds.”